Of course, people looked down on you. Mama Wong had been perfectly aware that none of our neighbors cared what she thought of them. That no one was ever going to come to her knowing that on her belt rattled certain keys. That she was always going to have to stand back and smile.
How humble!
people would say then.
How charming! How sweet!
She might as well have been a concubine.
On the other hand, what was a woman in China? There was a reason the wells of old were stuffed with bodies. More recently the fashion was for pesticides. Painless, people said, and what’s more, they gave your body a sweet smell. And had not Mama Wong’s mother been, after all, a real concubine? These days, there were women in Taipei and Hong Kong—businesswomen, wives of muckety-mucks—who were horrified by the idea of America.
Do you realize that in America everyone is treated the same?
they would ask.
Do you realize?
But for my mother, well—America! Here, a widow could walk into an office in Boston’s Chinatown and receive help with her mortgage application just like that.
An aide did the legal work for free. It wasn’t long before Mama Wong knew which areas to buy in, and which brokers to trust, and which sorts of triple-deckers brought in the most rent for the investment: 6-6-6es, because of the third bedroom in each unit. (
People pay more or less by bedroom,
she once explained to me.
Third bedroom mean you could rent to family, much less trouble than student.
) Sometimes Mama Wong credited my father for her success. If he hadn’t left a
so-called nest egg
—imagine. How lucky that he had taken out an insurance policy and then died!
But the other hero of her story was America.
Only in America!
was probably her favorite saying. Where else could people come with nothing and end with whole blocks of real estate? She swaggered around in her fur coat and sneakers. She wore rings big as road reflectors. The restaurant owners in Chinatown all knew her, and claimed their fathers knew her father in China, or else that their cousins had been schoolmates with her uncle. Never mind that they were Cantonese. They claimed that their brothers belonged to the same fraternity as my father. She never ate off the regular menu; she parked wherever she wanted. Exciting, of course, the red-eye disease of others. Rumor stalked her: her business habits, her spending habits, her savings habits. What wasn’t suspect? People scrutinized her cars, her clothes, her hair, her companions.
But if she was in love, it was with success. I tried to talk to her about balance. All she wanted, though, besides to expand, expand, was for me to agree success mattered.
— Otherwise, what? she said. Otherwise, you have to ride the subway, you know how people treat you there? Like a worm.
— I ride the subway all the time, I told her. It’s not that bad.
And yet I knew what a tough was, it was true. I knew what a gang was, and a knuckle sandwich. I understood that going up meant getting out.
BLONDIE /
Still he married me, Miss Make Your Own Meaning. Whenever Mama Wong thought of me, she bought herself a pair of shoes, or a pocketbook.
— Someday you will know what America is, she said.
CARNEGIE /
The week before our wedding, she bought a Mercedes. She steeled herself for the event by reading over the owner’s manual.
Ah, but those were the days, we saw now.
Mama Wong’s younger self would have been the first to point out, with a certain grim glee, the price of the Alzheimer’s unit of the Evergreen Overlook Assisted Living Residence Home. She loved to stand on the rock of no-nonsense.
What happen? In the end, you don’t even take care of me? Since when you have to pay outside people take care of your mother? What is Blondie doing, tell me. Work outside for what? I can tell you, she is not work for money. She is work for herself! Make everybody suffer. Even her own kids, she do not take care of them. Your mother took care of you your whole life. Struggle so hard. For what, tell me. For what?
Was it indeed for this that she had scrimped and saved? Guestimating and maneuvering, bluffing and cajoling? Had she filed and complained, appealed and consolidated so that Blondie and I could buy our way out of our familial obligation? Whatever Mama Wong’s other technical problems, her sound worked fine.
Ungrateful! Selfish! I work hard my whole life, for what?
Sometimes I was just glad she was past knowing that I really had squandered my inheritance on this, the poshest situation Blondie and I could find. Knowingly; we had done it knowingly. From day one we had been aware that this splendid situation with the wagon wheel in the garden, and the gnomes, and a Plexiglas-enclosed water feature, would eat up my after-tax inheritance in plus or minus ten years. Was it not a little noble that we had decided we did not care?
Throw mother out like garbage, waste money besides.
We knew how she felt. We knew.
BLONDIE /
But then, Mama Wong had never had to witness herself, as Carnegie and I had. She had never discovered herself wandering out in a thunderstorm, calling for her husband, or trying to tell a telephone operator, in Chinese, that she had fallen. She tried to bait a fish hook with her own finger for a worm. She tried to remove her security bracelet with a cleaver. We’d kept after her hair and her nails, but she smelled. And then, of course, there were the questions.
Whose children are these?
she’d ask, and one minute later:
Whose children are these?
Who the mother?
Who the father?
CARNEGIE /
We customized the house for her. Hired special help. Put in sound-absorbing materials. Edged the stairs and toilet seat with fluorescent tape. But still she would say,
I have no home. I have no home.
BLONDIE /
Perhaps we shouldn’t have moved her—she did get so much worse, living with us. Perhaps we should have gotten around-the-clock help, but left her in her house.
CARNEGIE /
Would-a, should-a, could-a. Anyway, it was too late.
Whose house is this? Whose house is this?
Is this your home? Is this your home?
It was hard not to suspect method in her madness.
BLONDIE /
She frightened poor Lizzy.
That is not Mama Wong,
she would cry.
That is not her!
One day Mama Wong wrestled Lizzy to the ground and tried to choke her.
CARNEGIE /
It was everything we could do to find a facility that didn’t smell.
BLONDIE /
Carnegie did not care for the English hunting prints. Nor did he like the violet motif.
CARNEGIE /
The decorator had a thing for sprigs.
BLONDIE /
But there was light and air too, and a security door. The porch furniture was wicker-like. There was a bulletin board posting that day’s activities—Sunshine breakfast, Morning Stretch ’n’ Tone, All-Time Favorite Love Songs.
And not to forget the staff of saints.
CARNEGIE /
Well, some saints, with an inevitable sprinkling of the ever-green. It was hard not to notice that their uniform patches read:
THE EVERGREEN OVERLOOK—EVERYTHING YOU’D WANT IN A HOME AND MORE.
There were aides who left when their shift was done, whether the new shift had shown up or not. There were aides who put the residents in one another’s clothes. The six-month turnover was close to one hundred percent.
BLONDIE /
Yet what about that aide who did morning exercises? That Caribbean man?
CARNEGIE /
Ah, yes. How sweetly he woke the patients up if necessary. Straightened them into play position that he might bop a red balloon to each of them in turn while Margot, the lunch person, asked,
Chicken Cordon Bleu or Pasta Primavera, Mr. Marx?
four or five times. That was in between
Becky, please sit down
and
How about you, Eric, Chicken Cordon Bleu or Pasta Primavera? Becky, please sit down.
How diplomatically too the staff dealt with bouts of diarrhea among the residents! Cleaning, airing, disinfecting as necessary.
BLONDIE /
Mama Wong had strawberries in season. She had a view.
CARNEGIE /
There were patients who screamed. There were patients who slept in the public areas. They lined up on the benches, slumping like stuffed animals. One hugged a doll; her family had supplied her with a doll crib and bassinet. One welcomed visitors.
Are you my child? You’ll be the death of me. Are you my child?
The home seemed to attract a musical bunch over the years. Patients who sang opera, patients who sang show tunes, patients who just sang. Some of the songs stuck with you:
You can feed her all day with the vitamin A and the bromo-fizz
But the medicine never gets anywhere near where the trouble is.
There’s a place for us. Somewhere a place for us.
Hello muddah. Hello faddah. Here I am in. Camp Granada.
All this talent was why the Musak had to be so loud.
One day we came in to find Mama Wong covered with bruises. She had been beaten up by another patient, who had thought Mama Wong a polar bear on the loose.
Get back in your cage!
he had yelled. Later he said that he never would have lifted a finger if the bear had moved. But the bear didn’t move. It just stood there in the hallway as if it didn’t speak English. He had had to hit it as a matter of public safety.
Mama Wong’s cheek was bruised, her arm was bruised. Happily and unhappily, she did not remember being called a polar bear. She did remember the attendants attacking her with an iceberg, though. Was that the ice bag? We never knew.
It was a sad moment, in any case, when Mama Wong put her weightless hand in mine. Forgetting her lifelong disappointment in me, she cried.
— Look what happened to you, I said. This will never happen to you again as long as I live.
— You take care of me?
Her voice was as thin and shaky as her hand. She was wearing a man’s sweater, Astroturf green, with a golf club and tee embroidered on it.
— I’ll take care of you, I said.
— I pay you?
— No, you won’t have to pay me.
— I give good tip anyway.
The trembling subsided.
— Seventeen percent, she said.
— Okay. Thanks.
I leaned across Mama Wong to draw the drape against the afternoon glare; Blondie stood to help. Mama Wong withdrew her skeletal hand into her grass-green sleeve. One of her orthopedic shoes was untied. Her hair was parted on one side toward the front half of her head, on the other side toward the back.
— Eighteen percent if you can make my son Carnegie get rid of that wife, she said.
— Okay.
— You know my son Carnegie?
— I do.
— Even as a baby he was pain in the neck, she said, her hand emerging suddenly. — Sometimes he cry cry, even I spank him, he do not stop.
— Well, I said, trying not to cry like my younger self all over again. — He survived you.
A short-haired attendant appeared in the doorway with a chart; I waved her away. Blondie rubbed my back sympathetically.
— How you know? Mama Wong demanded.
— I know.
— Oh really? She looked at me hard, hunching her back. Her eyes glittered as they rarely did anymore, being so dry.
— Really, I said.
— I know you, she said.
The attendant returned. Blondie waved her away as I had and, when she seemed disinclined to leave, politely shut the door in her face. A square of sun from the window popped up on the backside of the door.
— I know you.
— Yes, Ma, it’s—
— You just want twenty percent.
— No, Ma, I—
— I know you, don’t think I don’t know who you are. That’s why I give you nothing. You hear me? Nothing! Zero percent! Nothing!
She banged her open hand weakly on the bed.
BLONDIE /
It did seem sometimes that if anyone was going to die, it was Carnegie. His angina flared up badly enough at the Overlook that twice he had to take some nitroglycerin.
Still, he visited every single day, and afterward did a little work.
CARNEGIE /
Habit was habit.
BLONDIE /
— Why don’t you take a day off? I suggested one morning. — One day is not going to kill your mother.
I was having steel-cut oatmeal with brown sugar, my standard winter breakfast. On this I sprinkled pecans, and peach bits, and fresh blueberries while Carnegie fixed his All-Bran with 2%.
CARNEGIE /
Call me perverse: I rather liked my breakfast to resemble a post-consumer recycled material.
— Carpe diem, I said. Memento mori.
— Exactly.
— Think how the kids feel that I take time for business trips but not them.
— Exactly.
— And the marriage. Think what it would mean to the marriage.
— You might think of it.
— I flunked my stress test.
— You flunked your stress test.
— So isn’t it time to live? Should I not start living my own life before I die?
— Shouldn’t you?
BLONDIE /
He went back to processing the paper. Front page, op-ed, business. He never clipped anything.
I was the clipper in the family. I was fascinated by home-schoolers. Homesteaders. Ranchers. Recently I had clipped an article about a community of women in China who slept with men but did not live with them. The family was headed by a matriarch, possessions passed down through the daughters. Women took lovers as they liked. The Na, these were.
Carnegie had never heard of them.
Now he scratched his nose. When he was done with his cereal, I took his bowl but did not produce his coffee. This made him look up.
I waved.
CARNEGIE /
From the far end of the great room came the whir of a rodent on its exercise wheel. Next to it hulked the treadmill, on which I defied my mortality, after careful stretching, watching my heart rate, once a week. Steel and rubber, with red plastic accents, it had that vaguely downtown, quasi-industrial look once associated with artists’ lofts, now complete with training zone chart. Truly it filled one with despair, especially illuminated, as it was now, with the sort of vaporous morning light that could almost have been the precious downward glance of a normally distracted divinity.